Berlin airport used in cold war airlift poised to play refugee role

Pro-migrant demonstrators in Berlin are ready to welcome thousands of refugees. Story on page A17.

Photo: AXEL SCHMIDT, Staff

BERLIN - The planes touched down every five minutes for months, often cutting through a thick fog to bring food, coal and other supplies to those marooned on an island in a red sea of communism, as the grim joke went.

Tempelhof Airport was, in the Cold War's early days, a lifeline for West Berliners isolated from the world during the Berlin Blockade. Its two runways accommodated a constant stream of Western cargo planes dubbed "Raisin Bombers."

Now the iconic former airport will reprise that role, offering refuge in a city adept at adapting to crisis, as hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers pour into Europe, a Berlin official said Friday.

Berliners' apparent acceptance of Tempelhof's new use as a home for some of the migrants is a reflection of a large-scale willingness across Germany to accommodate the newcomers - a message that has reached Syria and Iraq, where the war-weary view Germany as a haven and a welcoming destination.

After receiving the most asylum applications of any industrialized nation last year, Germany expects about 800,000 migrants by the end of 2015 as Europe faces perhaps its worst migration crisis since World War II.

Germans have scoured their surroundings for housing, with some residents even opening up their homes. Empty U.S. Army barracks that once housed thousands of soldiers at the former headquarters in Heidelberg, closed two years ago, have been reopened for migrants along with other shuttered military posts.

1,000 arrivals each day

The task of providing shelter is especially daunting in Germany's capital. It will receive about 5 percent of the migrants, a share based on its population and tax revenue, as dictated by the 1949 Koenigstein Agreement.

Faced with the prospect of 40,000 newcomers, Berlin has added portable shipping containers, stacked apartments of corrugated metal that in some cases come complete with shared kitchens and bathrooms. By the end of last month the containers, which can be seen in southwest Berlin, housed more than 2,000 people.

But Berlin has started seeing about 1,000 new arrivals each day - what it used to receive in a month, said Bernhard Schodrowski, a city spokesman. Many of the migrants are being placed in makeshift tent camps, an option viewed as a last resort.

"It's an urgent situation," Schodrowski said.

August's record heat has already given way to a September chill, with temperatures dipping into the low 50s, adding urgency to the need for sturdier shelter.

City officials said Friday they would go ahead with plans to shelter migrants at Tempelhof, as well as at an old bank, Schodrowski said. The Internationales Congress Centrum Berlin, among the largest convention centers in the world before it closed last year, is also being considered.

About 500 to 700 migrants will be housed in small structures in one unused hangar of Tempelhof to ensure some privacy, perhaps as soon as next week, Schodrowski said.

The airport has been used in recent years as a commercial center and a cultural venue, and was busy this week with preparations for the Lollapalooza music festival, which will have its European debut there this weekend.

Breaking Soviet blockade

Among other obstacles, officials say they will have to figure out how to provide adequate bathroom facilities, as well as insulate the hangars against the Berlin winter.

It has been seven years since the last flight departed Tempelhof and its seven hangars and sprawling airfield.

It was at Tempelhof that Orville Wright kept his homemade craft in the air for a full minute in 1909, and Lufthansa made its maiden flight from the airport in 1926. The U.S. military took it over after World War II, and in 1948 and 1949 Allied nations used it to solve the problem of reaching starving Berliners cut off by a Soviet blockade.

The result was a Cold War coup, the airlift of supplies directly into West Berlin.

But with two other commercial airports now serving the city, officials sought to close Tempelhof in 2008. Some Berliners tried to block the move, initiating a referendum to save its soaring architecture and protect the historical legacy of what they saw as a cultural landmark - what the British architect Norman Foster once called "the mother of all airports."

But these days, more than its history and architecture draw the affection of Berliners. A new public park has replaced the airfield. Slightly larger than Central Park in Manhattan, it has become an open-air haven for kites and Frisbees, attracting tens of thousands of visitors weekly in the summer.

Last year Berliners again rallied on the site's behalf with another referendum, this time to block the city's proposal to build apartments, offices and a library on some of the land. The preservationists won, and also secured protection for the land for at least a decade.

But the arrival of the migrants has finally put city officials and preservationists on the same page. Margarete Heitmueller, a member of 100% Tempelhofer Feld, which led the fight against the park's development, said its central location would make it easier for volunteers to deliver supplies to the new arrivals - and its history makes it an even more auspicious choice.

"For us it is a very good idea to bring refugees to the airport because the airport itself, it is a symbol in Berlin for helpfulness and freedom," she said.

Not all of the airport's historic chapters are illustrious. In the 1930s, Hitler planned to make it his "world airport." The tiered roof of the sweeping, semicircular building stands as a reminder of those days, with a grandstand that could accommodate more than 100,000 spectators, including those the Nazis hoped would attend their victory celebration.

'So much potential'

Standing outside the old terminal after touring Tempelhof on Wednesday, Ryan Speicher, 36, described handing out food recently to newly arrived migrants, who kept repeating what he speculated was their first German word: It was "danke," thank you. An American who has lived in Berlin for three years, he reflected on the airport's history.

"Just the idea that it was built for rather evil purposes and that it's been used mainly for a lot of good things and now Berliners love it - the field, the park, the festivals - and that now it could serve as a temporary home for a lot of needy people," Speicher said. "So much history, but so much potential still in the future."